How Green Was My Valley

Now this one gets a bit involved, but do bear with me.
It’s in all the papers today. Sheikh Mohammad has announced that all buildings in Dubai after January 2008 must be constructed as ‘green’ buildings ‘to the highest international standards’ according to my usual favourite linking source, Gulf News.
The news comes as Pacific Controls inaugurates its headquarters, which has been constructed to the US Green Buildings Council standard. That was inaugurated yesterday, just in time to be in today’s news, by Mohammad Abdullah Al Gergawi, UAE Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs. Also present were members of the Emirates Green Building Council and ‘environmentalists.
Today also sees the announcement of the inauguration of the Middle East Centre for Sustainable Development, an initiative backed by The Environment Health and Safety (EHS) and Pacific Controls. If you were wondering who EHS were, according to the 1st September story on the announcement of the MCSD in Arabianbusiness.com, it’s the environment, health and safety division of Dubai World (whose CEO, Sultan bin Sulayem, patronised the launch). The ‘establishment will facilitate the roll out of green buildings to developers in Dubai World and the Middle East, provide service and systems that will establish guidelines for all development projects, assist them to achieve LEED certification, under USGBC/EGBC Guidelines and/or certification, established under the guidelines of MCSD, thus enabling sustainable development in the whole Middle East region.’
This must be all be regarded as something of a PR coup for Pacific Controls which, of course, supplies consulting and engineering for intelligent and ‘green’ buildings. And which first launched the Middle East Centre for Sustainable Development back in August. So this is a pretty neat second hit at the story!
Pacific is an interesting company, originally headquartered in Australia, it appears to have moved its head office to Dubai - and CEO Dilip Rahulman is also chairman of Solar Technologies, a Free Zone company that, back in 2006, announced the establishment of a Dhs50 million solar power energy facility in Dubai Techno Zone. So quite a commitment to Dubai from Pacific...
The company's green HQ was originally intended to be opened in April 2006, according to this company release dated February 9th 2006, but perhaps more interesting is that the building was originally to be certified by a completely different body to the USGBC - in fact, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) was originally to provide certification. Both of these facts perhaps would arguably merit further investigation, but our investigative media would appear to be too busy fighting over cash awards from the government.
In news completely unrelated to the sudden outbreak of green angst in Dubai, an international UN-backed conference on the global environment today opened in Abu Dhabi, organised by The Environment Agency, Abu Dhabi and UNEP, which is behind the GEO-4 report on the state of, and trends in, the global environment.